The Ortus BlogBox

We at Ortus are excited to announce Gavin Pickin as the new ContentBox evangelist. He has been involved with the Box Community for a very long time and has always brought great ideas and help to the team and product suite. In his new role, he will lead the evangelism and direction of the ContentBox CMS Platform. We are also excited to announce our public product roadmap for ContentBox and the general availability of our beta bleeding edge downloads. So let’s find out a little about him.

Biography

Gavin was born and raised in Auckland, New Zealand… before moving to California at the age of 21. When New Zealand’s patchy weather let him go outside, he was constantly playing cricket, soccer, tennis, rugby, track and field, almost any sport that he could. When weather kept him inside, curiosity and computers kept him entertained. Gavin took the competitiveness and curiosity with him to University where he won a Senior Prize for Management Science and Information Systems and was invited into the prestigious Honors program, but decided to head abroad for International Experience. Upon completion of his Degree, he left New Zealand for California, where he has lived ever since. Now with a beautiful wife, and 5 great kids, he’s made a lifetime home in California.

Life in Web Development

While studying at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, Gavin starting working Part Time for the School of Business as a WebMaster. In his final year of school, Gavin was invited to be part of the first “E-Business Team”, brought together to build a cohesive brand for the University. This is where Gavin was introduced to ColdFusion 4.5, and in the first weekend, he built a full blown app, and never looked back.

After arriving in California, he worked with a small company, helping them grow to become a million dollar company, with a custom designed k12 focused education content management system, which got the attention of the big players. After 6 years, he moved to a bigger company focused more on custom solutions, where he expanded his knowledge and tools as more detailed end to end systems were built, using ColdFusion and Javascript, including hybrid mobile apps with the help of Cordova.

Responsible for all aspects of the development process, from project specification, database design, devops, graphic design, server side and client side applications, Gavin’s experience has allowed him to fit well into any project, and his passion to learn and grow mean’s he is not afraid to tackle new technology.

History in *Box

After working on several custom built frameworks over many years of work with ColdFusion (that show remnants of fusebox remains), Gavin knew scaling his projects would require an adoption of community driven well known frameworks, not only for technical reasons, but for onboarding new developers. This lead Gavin to a ColdBox Bootcamp prior to cf.Objective() in 2013 where he met the ColdBox team and other new Boxers. It seemed like a natural progression, picked it up quickly, and contributed to the ColdBox world with a starter Project ColdBox Koans and presented at the ColdBox Developer week soon after.

Since then Gavin has continued to integrate more of the Box platform into legacy projects and new projects alike, and dive into new technology like TestBox and CommandBox as it came out. Gavin has continued to participate in the community, on Mailing Lists, ColdBox Developer Weeks, and Into the Box, and also guest blog posts and Roadshow presentations.

After many months of development we have finally released ContentBox version 2.1.0. This is a minor release but it might as well be a major release due to the over 60 different tickets and issues resolved. This release is one of the biggest in terms of tuning and bug fixes. As our usage increases, so does the edge-cases and usability issues. This release addresses a tremendous amounts of usability issues, bug fixes and a plethora of updates and new features. So let's check out the major features in this release and you can check out the release notes here (https://ortussolutions.atlassian.net/jira/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10008&version=11702)

Remember Me

The administrator module login has been updated to allow for session tracking to allow for administrators to remain logged in for 1 day, month, week, etc. This surely helps in not re-authenticated every session if desired.

No Layout Content

You can now choose the -No Layout- option for content that will allow for the content to be rendered out to the user as-is, with no theme inclusions. This allows for content to be pulled as-is from Ajax or mobile applications.

Stats Tracker

The entire stats tracker has been updated thanks to the awesome folks from Akitogo. This will allow for faster stat tracking and also bot protection and ignores. You can even configure it all from the administrator module and reset stats on a case-by-case basis.

Lucee Support

The entire ContentBox engine is now Lucee 4.5+ compatible and our WAR and Express editions are running also on the Lucee CFML Engine.

ColdBox RC/PRC Integration

Al ContentBox editors now have the capability to render out content from the ColdBox request collection and private request collection by using the following markup: . This will allow for further integration between CMS and MVC framework, as it allows anything in the life-cycle of the MVC request to deposit content on the RC or PRC scopes that are ultimately available at the content level.

Rate Limiter

Our focus on this release has been on security and performance. We have added the abilities to activate rate limiting on all requests to the administrator and content modules. You can fine-tune the engine to only rate-limit cookie-less requests or all requests. You can also chose the duration and counter stats for the limiting.

Login Tracker

In our continued push on security, thanks to Akitogo yet again, we have fine-tuned a login tracker for the administrator module. If activated, it will track invalid and valid attempts to the administrator module. It can also allow for max attempts before blocking requests and a very nice auth log viewer and manager.

SSL Pages

You can now select for a specific page to be available only on SSL mode via the page modifiers.

Localized Modules

Our push to localizing the admin is in progress and several modules are completely localized in English, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese.

Search Improvements

Administrator and site search has been improved to allow for better creator and editor searching. You can also choose which content items will appear in the search by using the Display Options or Blog Modifiers respectively.

Content Store Hierarchy

The entire Content Store has been updated to allow for complete hierarchies. This allows you to logically group content store items instead of only relying with category tagging. This can produce rich tree models for content store items that can be retrieve in one single JSON call as well.

We are so excited to announce the general availability of 5 new Ortus Books in print and kindle format about our products. We have been hard at work to produce high quality documentation and transition all our documentation to book format. We only have two more in the works right now with a target release of May (ColdBox + ContentBox). So without further ado, here are the 5 new books for your reading pleasure!

We are extremely excited to announce the comeback of the Into The Box developer conference. This year we had a sold out conference, over 14 incredible sessions and even a surprise Mariachi band in the closing session! Into The Box 2015 will be bigger and brighter!

Into The Box is a 1-day, 2-track event with speakers from around the world presenting on topics surrounding web technologies, software craftsmanship and the Ortus Solutions product stack. It will be held 1 day before one of the biggest enterprise development conferences in the world: dev.Objective() on May 12th, 2015. We are currently seeking speakers and will providing a line up in January.

The registration for this event not only gets you in for a great day of training and networking but also you will receive the following and more: